London clearly agrees with
Ben Quilty
. We are just easing into our first pint at The Harp, an upstanding little pub near Covent Garden on a muggy London afternoon, when he launches into a long spiel about two exhibitions he has seen.

The first is Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, a summer blockbuster at Tate Modern devoted to the final chapter of the master’s career when he began “carving into colour" with scissors and painted paper. The second is a showing of 16 iPad drawings by
David Hockney
called The Arrival of Spring.

Both sets of works were produced by ageing, successful artists who could be excused for resting on their laurels. Yet each bucked convention by using new techniques to create art of astonishing freshness. Quilty, who turned 40 last year, was bowled over by the experience.

“Matisse was this 80-year-old man making groundbreaking, massive, confident works that changed the course of contemporary art," he says. “Hockney was one of the best solo commercial shows I’ve ever seen in my life. He has sort of reclaimed the visual language from the digital world. It’s profound what he’s done.

“I think 40 is the new 20. I really do. I think I want to live a long time because I have a lot to make and a lot to say. And it’s the first time I’ve really felt that." He certainly looks in decent shape not withstanding the beer we are drinking. Tall, thin and sporting his trademark beard, Quilty looks like he could make it to a ripe old age – or at least his stated aim of “smashing past 80 or 90".

He is entitled to be upbeat. Winner of the main prize at the inaugural Prudential Eye Awards for Contemporary Asian Art in January, he collected $US50,000 and an invite to be the first Australian to have a solo show at the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea.

Quilty has become the closest thing Australia has to a celebrity contemporary artist. In 2011, he won the Archibald award with a portrait of his friend Margaret Olley and was appointed the Australian War Memorial’s official war artist. He then produced a series of remarkable, acclaimed paintings from his deployment with Australian troops in Afghanistan and featured on ABC’s Australian Story.

Afghanistan, he says, changed his career more than anything else. He became an outspoken critic of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs’ perceived failure to care for returned soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a position that won him no friends in certain quarters and huge support from the troops on the ground.

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But there is no doubting the importance – on a professional level – of his latest show. The Saatchi Gallery has exhibited major figures like
Jeff Koons
and
Damien Hirst
.

Saatchi means an artist has entered orbit

“A solo show at the Saatchi doesn’t so much launch the careers of major contemporary artists; it means an artist has already entered orbit," wrote Kit Messham-Muir, a senior lecturer in art history at the University of Newcastle, in The Conversation.

A week ago, Quilty landed at Heathrow with his family and began hanging the show almost straight away, a process that included spray painting one of the walls. He gave his first interviews in a fog of jetlag and paint fumes. When I last saw him at drinks in the late hours after his opening, he was exhausted.

But the artist is back in good form for our chat. The Harp proves you can drink near Covent Garden without being overrun by tourists, but even at four o’clock the downstairs area is crowded with locals.

So we settle in at a table in the quieter upstairs room. The walls are the same shade of pink as Quilty’s shirt, a present from his wife Kylie, dotted with tiny flamingos. Our drop of choice is lager, which would disappoint the regulars sipping “real ales" but seems like a good idea on a close London day.

Quilty is much in demand these days, which is why we’re having afternoon beers rather than a meal. Earlier this week his family – including children Joe and Olivia – had lunch with
Kerry Stokes
, the executive chairman of
Seven Group Holdings
, whose media empire once employed Quilty as tape editor.

Quilty quit Seven when he won the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in 2002. It was the first time he could pursue his “hobby" without holding down a day job. He was worried Seven would never have him back if his new career failed but instead received a congratulatory hand-written letter from the art-loving chairman.

Over a second pint, I ask why Australian visual artists are not always valued in this part of the world. While our actors, writers and musicians cut it with the best of them, you have to go back to the 1950s when
Sidney Nolan
lived in London to find an ­Australian painter showing their work to genuine acclaim.

“It’s a really complex question and I don’t quite know the answer to it," Quilty replies. “And I think in a way Nolan is one of the only seriously great international artists from Australia of the last 30 or 40 years. I’m going to be bagged out for saying that but compared to what was happening in the rest of the world during that period – he was our genuinely groundbreaking con­temp­orary artist.

“I think one of the things about Australian artists is they quite often become pastiches of themselves. And there is no way you are going to make it if you do that for one day let alone 30 years. But I still think having one Sidney Nolan in the past 40 years means we are punching above our weight."

Drinking is a prominent theme

We agree on a third. Quilty tries to get our photographer to have one but he insists on a Coke. I promptly forget to order it when I go to the bar. Drinking is a prominent theme in Quilty’s work, much of which is an exploration of Australian masculinity. He has painted smashed Holden Toranas, drunken holidays in Fiji, skulls, scowling explorers or his pissed mates with thickly textured paint applied with palette knives.

When he was younger, Quilty “went mad". He got blind, took “as many drugs as I could take" and got into fights. He has “black dots" in the left of his vision from being kicked in the face when he was 19 or 20 in Sydney’s George Street. He says, “It was dangerous and wild and horrendous. I never threw the first punch but I was in a lot of fights and I always used to get bashed up. I have soft painter’s hands."

Now that he is 40 and a father, Quilty says he likes young men “more than I did when I was a young man".

“I think I realised it was probably only partly my fault that I did what I did," he says. “It is all about initiating yourself. To go through an initiation, it has to be physical. Therefore what young men do is reckless and dangerous and violent. There are no initiation ceremonies for young white men in our country. In Australia, Aboriginal men can take 13 years to be initiated. We get one night – your 18th birthday party. It is just pathetic." He suggests men need to open up and discuss these issues publicly. “But of course they won’t talk about it."

It is time for a fourth. This time our photographer Julian has one, perhaps realising that soft drink is never going to arrive. A chap at a nearby table is snoring.

This is the first year Quilty will not play football for his beloved Robertson Rovers. For a while conversation drifts to the World Cup. It is the day after Germany smashed Brazil 7-1 and we spend some time discussing the importance of a good centre-half. It is becoming difficult to steer the chat back to art but we manage after a while.

A self-described “competitive person", Quilty nevertheless seems to derives genuine pleasure from talking up the next generation of artists. An Art Gallery of NSW trustee and ambassador for youth, he nominates Sydney-based ceramic artist Juz Kitson as one of his favourites as well as “the hardest working young artist I’ve ever met".

(A couple of days after our drinks, he emails me a list of others including Rob McHaffie, Mitch Cairns and Fiona Lowry.) He believes “friendly competition", such as with sculptor Caroline Rothwell, is healthy.

He does read bad reviews

He is less enthusiastic about some aspects of the Australian arts community, which can be bitchy and unforgiving towards its more successful members. Quilty says he left the “white noise" behind a “long time ago", moving his family to Robertson, in NSW’s Southern Highlands. But he is honest enough to concede he does read bad reviews. He has been known to write letters to reviewers or even name a particularly good painting after a hostile critic, “just to show them". But after a few hours the letter is shelved and the name is scratched out and Quilty moves on. “I’ve learnt not to care," he says.

Where the criticism has made a more lasting impact is in the use of photography. Like many artists, Quilty has used photographs as the basis for some of his paintings. It is a technique some critics such as The Australian’s Christopher Allen believe is a form of cheating. Quilty says,“I get [Allen’s] point. The photograph is already the object. And the painting is the sediment at the end of filtering that photograph. There’s no way around that. But there are artists who can successfully manipulate photographs to make great art. It’s this black-and-white rule about photography that does my head in. There are grey areas."

Quilty reckons most critics cannot tell the difference between works that use photographs and those that don’t. Nevertheless he has given up using them in his work.

It’s around this point that Julian insists on buying a round. We should say no but don’t. The late sunsets in London in July mean it still feels early.

Next week, Quilty and his family will set up in Paris for three months. He has been moving “very fast" in recent years and is looking forward to having some time to focus on his work. He says he works more slowly these days. Some argue that his work has become more lyrical in recent years.

Certainly becoming a father has changed Quilty. “I stopped being a dickhead when I had kids. They are good little people. I like spending time with my wife. This has been a surreal experience but we live normal lives in a lot of ways."

Quilty is looking forward to testing himself once again: “There is this thing about getting old and becoming stilted and doing the same thing over and over again – which so many Australian artists do and so many artists around the world do.

“But the ones that really changed the course of art do not stop reinventing themselves. I hate to return to that David Hockney show but it was just overwhelming. He’s 77 years old and drawing on an iPad. I hope I can do a Hockney when I’m in Paris."